This has serious repercussions on both Egypt & more tellingly on Russia.

“On Thursday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that it was “more likely than not” that a bomb caused the crash.” If I were in the shoes of an accident investigator or aviation head of security, I’d like to know based on what findings? However, publically Cameron did not share his stated reasons with Putin. Something clearly troubled the high echelons of the UK intelligence community. This suggests that some factors are intel driven, either pre-accident or post Sinai incident, or both with sources being closely guarded to protect the systems or sources.

The clue is in the sudden reaction of the UK authorities in taking unprecedented steps to stop flights altogether, an event rare as a hen’s teeth, particularly in this commercially driven society of ours. There are a number of elements related to the Sinai crash that are still disjointed, but even the Russian authorities are keeping mum for the time being.This kind decision is never done lightly by one country due to the serious diplomatic & economic fall-out. As this is being written, a number of European countries have taken identical measures with respect to flights & travel to Egypt. I don’t think that EU political authorities are trying to capitalize on this devastating tragedy for Russia, although the European mainstream media clearly is: some are really scrapping the barrel of depravity in their portrayal of the Sinai crash.

The Daily Mail mentioned that GCHQ intercepted 'chatter' just before as well as after the crash. Assuming that intel received was mostly post-accident, if GCHQ re-examined its intel trawls to recheck 'chatter', then this might account for the time delay between the Sinai crash and the announcements of flights cancellations several days after the initial crash. Maybe some low level 'chatter' did came to light prior the Sinai crash about an ISIS affiliated or type of terrorist group in Egypt. Likewise, maybe additional 'chatter' or intercepts showed they are trying to plan or try to carry out some action on the back of the Sinai crash. Or, through subsequent intel harvesting, it became apparent that a significant terrorist risk has been revealed, with connections to Cairo airport as well as Sharm el Sheikh.

Another possible line of thought is that the intel is in fact mostly pre-accident information, already known by the UK and or the ‘five eyes’group. It is quite plausible that the disclosure of such information was not picked up and did not reach the relevant political levels until some days later and as such the UK needed to do some backtracking to cover this. Another idea centers on the possibility that information on a potential terrorist event in the region was ‘harvested’ prior to the crash but not shared in the worldwide intel community, either in time or at all to take any action. Maybe it was an instance of some vague information between known suspects which could not be confirmed or effectively acted upon. As Snowden clearly pointed out, surveillance done through intensive mass electronic eavesdropping, aka "data-mining" does not lend itself to be actually being in a good position in preventing acts of terrorism.

A more horrifying interpretation is that intel was known but deliberately withheld from the Russians for political gains. Given the political prism in which the West views Russia, this idea cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, mostly because it is apparent some UK intel was passed to the US & then parts to the French, German, Irish & Dutch intelligence community. The Russian authorities seem not be party to UK intelligence and so must have even more grave doubts about the West, especially in light of the urgent UK response that triggered the rash of flight cancellations, travel advisory warnings & rescue flights in Europe.

It is plausible to consider that the’ terrorist’ cat is definitely out of the bag and Egypt once more is paying the price for being seen to have a shoddy aviation security.